I PEDALED THAT BICYCLE all the way from my growing-up years to the present day. And I began to see people I knew, shopkeepers, old neighbors, and I waved and called out “Hi.” A couple of times I stopped and talked with somebody from my school days, and that was fine.
I rode over to Commerce Street, past the Slide Inn Café, past the icehouse where a bucket came flying out of the darkness just in time to trip up poor George Pearson and send him to his death by hanging.
The exhilaration of my first ride through town was fading under the glare of a morning sun that was beating down hard. I was out of training for Mississippi summers. My thirst was demanding attention, and I remembered a pump at the end of the cotton-loading dock at the gin, just down from the depot.
I pedaled down Myrtle Street to the end of the platform that ran from the cotton gin beside the tracks of the Jackson & Northern line. I leaned my machine against the retaining wall and turned to the pump.
As I worked the handle and reveled in the water—half drinking, half splashing my face—I heard a loud voice behind me, an angry voice.
“What the hell makes you nigger boys think you can come high-walkin’ into our town looking for a job? All our jobs belong to white men.”
At the other end of the platform were two large and burly men I recognized as the Purneau brothers, Jocko and Leander, an unpleasant pair of backwoods louts who had been running the cotton gin for Old Man Furnish as long as I could remember. The two of them towered over three scrawny black boys who looked to be fifteen years old, maybe even younger.
“Well, suh, we just thinking with the crop coming you might be needin’ some mo’ help round the gin,” said one of the boys.
“That’s the trouble with you niggers, is when you set in to tryin’ to think,” said Leander Purneau. He spoke in a friendly, jokey voice, which put me, and the boy, off guard. But then he popped him a solid punch on the side of his face and sent the boy down onto his knees.
The other boys skittered away like bugs from a kicked-over log. Suddenly I really was back in the past, and the boy on the ground was in serious trouble, like poor George Pearson had been.
There was one difference now—I was not a timid little boy. I was a grown man. As I wiped my wet hands on my shirt, I considered what I was about to do.
If I caused a commotion, made a scene, called attention to myself, I might endanger my mission even before it started.
But if I did nothing?
Fortunately, the boy on the ground rolled over and jumped up. He sprinted off down the platform, holding his jaw, but at least he was getting away.
And at that very moment, I felt something cold and hard jammed against the side of my neck.
It felt an awful lot like the barrel of a gun.
A deep voice behind me: “Just put your hands in the air. Nice and slow, high, that’s the way to do it.”